Colonial Canada Now (Part Four)

Colonial Canada Now  (Part Four). “Communication” in Canada.


Intense indoctrination is carried out, it is true, by an increasingly ownership-concentrated, “Americanized”, private corporate press and media in Canada.  (Read ASPER NATION by Marc Edge, Vancouver, New Star Books, 2007).  As well, tireless indoctrination is carried on by sell-out governments (provincial and federal). We should speak of public “communication” if we want to get a handle on what is being done by lies and manipulation to the minds of Canadians.

Just for instance, the B.C. government has conducted an expensive, on-going misinformation campaign about “energy shortage” and the facts concerning the sell-out of the Province’s rivers. The federal (Stephen Harper) government has “managed” and mismanaged information, and has misled Canadians – as a policy decision – on Canada’s participation in the Afghanistan War.

Indoctrination – in addition - is routinely practiced by so-called “objective”, corporation-supported economic think tanks, and more and more by educational institutions (whether private or public).  Indeed, in the last fifty years the grip that the private corporate class has taken on public universities in Canada has tightened alarmingly.

The (April 17 08 A3) Globe and Mail reports that the “Embattled [U.S.] head of Queen’s will step down”.  The imported, U.S. citizen, principal of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, so offended the student body that when Karen Hitchcock (formerly president of the State University of New York at Albany) applied to be renewed as principal of Queen’s, heavy resistance appeared.  Hitchcock, the students alleged, revealed “failure to understand, take action on and be engaged in the issues that are of most importance to students”. 

So spirited was the debate that the university review committee did not recommend Hitchcock’s reappointment.  She will go.

A tempest in a teapot?  Not at all.

Rather, the Queen’s conflict is a sign the university community is re-colonizing at breakneck speed.  The battle of the 1960s and 1970s to fight discrimination against excellent Canadians for university positions eventuated in real change.  Canadian hirings to 
Canadian universities and colleges increased dramatically.  Canadian curriculum was amplified importantly.  By the 1980s an unspoken rule was in place that university and college presidents and principals had to be Canadian.

The system worked – as such systems work in every major industrialized country.  Quite simply, those countries value their own excellent people as unequivocally advantageous in every way to the country.  But Canadian corporations – often U.S. Branch Plants, the U.S. government, Canadian colonial politicians, and sell-out boards of trustees (like the one at Queen’s), as well as sell-out university administrators have double-crossed Canadians.
They have battled out front and in the back rooms for 25 years to return to a system that discriminates against Canada and excellent Canadians.  Canada’s “leading” universities have been flooding in  foreign – especially U.S. – faculty and top administrators like Karon Hitchcock. The colonial Canadians apparently believe that Canadians experienced in and knowledgeable about the Canadian system are, by definition, inferior to anyone from outside, especially anyone from the U.S.A.

Bill Young, chair of the Queen’s board of trustees, regretted the public involvement there in the Hitchcock fight, saying he thought  “public discussion and debate” is “not the way one would want to see the institution and its alumni discuss” the important issues.

He assured the press that “an international search” [in the U.S.A.?] will begin for “a permanent replacement”.  I write “[in the U.S.A.?] “  because Canada’s international searches for talent almost always end up with the choice of U.S. candidates.  “International searches” conducted from Canada rarely extend farther than the U.S.  No surprise.  That is what a colony does.

Canada – by the 1980s – had achieved a system which fully respected and used excellent Canadians in the higher education system of Canada.  In a 25 year battle the people dominant in that system have returned it to what they must believe is its “proper colonial status”.

The university/college battle is important because it reveals that when Canadians gain central control of a major institutional force in the society, that is considered a mistake. “North American” forces go to work immediately to reverse the victory and return Canada to colonial condition.  The battles – such as this one – which the “North American” forces fight are not conducted for the sake of excellence but to assure colonial subjugation and imperial dominance.

The major press and media, as Marc Edge reveals in his study of CanWest Global (the Asper corporation) have in the last quarter of a century, many believe, diminished journalistic quality generally, moved toward a yankee style of sensationalism and propaganda, and have shaped monopoly operations that actively deny publicly important information to the public.  Every (rare) time I open the continually money-losing National Post (CanWest owned and apparently kept alive as a political instrument not a profit-getter) I smile.  A reactionary club, I see it being used to batter Canadians who are anti-colonials.  I remember that the National Post was created by a man who is now serving a criminal sentence in the U.S.A. for some of his actions as an “international” media baron.

Other forms of “communication”, however apparently unpolitical, are claimed often to need U.S. dominance.  Canada’s symphony orchestras are said to hire a majority of “foreign” musicians because – the argument goes – Canadian musicians aren’t (somehow) good enough.  But of course the foreign percentage in Canadian orchestras is overwhelmingly a U.S. percentage.  People who know the exact percentages of Canadian symphony orchestras by citizenship are loathe to reveal the numbers.  In addition, many of the U.S. musicians who get the break of their lives – by being hired to a major Canadian orchestra – are often quite willing to bury their origins by taking Canadian citizenship.  That is not to say they design to cover-up their origins.  They are often just eager, enthusiastic people, unaware they are statistics in the story of Canada’s continuing colonial status.

Of course, no major Canadian symphony orchestra has a Canadian conductor.

Canada’s film industry is the monumental, gigantic example of Canada’s institutionalized, on-going, intentional U.S. colonization.  For 75 years the U.S. has known that a Canadian (English and French language) film industry of excellent and high-level production would take a large portion of film profits in the world.  In the huge English-speaking world Canadian culture, ideas and behaviour have a great deal of currency.  In the French-speaking world an audience of 100 million is available to Canadian (Quebec) production.  And so over the history of film as a major entertainment, profit-making industry, the U.S., with Canadian government assistance, has killed the possibility of a major, internationally successful film industry in Canada.  Not incidentally, by doing that the Canadian government subjects the Canadian people to an endless, mindless, tidal wave of U.S. propaganda and cultural imperialism.

Put in briefest words, Canadian governments have allowed U.S. ownership and control of Canadian film distribution and theatres. When the U.S. acted to own distribution networks and theatres in the world, European governments blocked the move.  Canadian governments welcomed it.  Canadian governments have allowed a film exchange between the two countries without any basis of reciprocal viewing.  They have destroyed or starved Canadian film making centres of excellence: the Ontario Motion Picture Bureau and the National Film Board, just for instance.

There is nothing good that can be said about the colonial-minded Canadian governments and their bureaucratic lackeys at organizations variously called “Telefilm Canada”, “The Canadian Film Development Corporation”, and other like names.

The brightest badge of self-imposed colonialism in Canada is the almost non-existent, social welfare style activity we call “Canada’s film industry”.  We think of our present press and media as disgraces in the life of the country.  They are that.  Their activity is full of sell-outs, opportunists, time-servers, fawners on U.S. power, and cultural suicides.

In Canadian film-making activity, on the other hand, there are hard-working, talented, committed, caring Canadians.  When they sell-out, they are forced to do so, often.  Whatever their politics or cultural ideas, they all have a common distinguishing feature.  It is a dagger sticking out of each of their backs that has been planted there by their colonial masters in the Canadian government.